Surveys have been used for many years to determine the opinions of a selected audience. The audience may be selected from a group of people at random, or selected by predetermined characteristics, such as age, race, political preference, sex, physical characteristics, economic status, education, vocation, etc.
It is often helpful to survey a group of people gathered together, such as during a seminar, sales meeting, convention, etc., to obtain their opinions regarding a selected set of questions. This is often regarded as a "Questionaire", where the group to be surveyed fills in the blanks or marks a series of boxes, according to their response to a variety of questions such as "Did you find the seminar `not useful`, `somewhat useful`, `very useful` or `extremely useful`." "Rate the speaker: `not knowledgeable`, `somewhat knowledgeable`, `knowledgeable`, `very knowledgeable`.
The selected questions can range from a simple "yes" or "no", to rating a selected response on a scale from "one through ten", etc.
The problem with current survey technology, is the difficulty of obtaining the results promptly. One means currently in use is "manual grading", another technique is the use of "punch cards", or the use of "lead pencils", or "masks". Such techniques rarely provide a comprehensive response minutes of completing the survey, particularly where a survey of 100 or more people is involved.